A Taxonomy of the Legal Tech Tools That Are Changing the Practice of Law

The practice of law is undergoing a tectonic shift as legal departments are being called upon to provide strategic guidance to the business. Legal Ops professionals have been instrumental in helping them incorporate technology into departmental workflows and become even better strategic partners. Joe Regalia presents a taxonomy of legal tech tools that should empower every legal department in a Write.Law.com blog post.

Last month, we published the post “Legal Technology is Transforming Work in Legal Ops,” which emphasized emergent technologies bringing legal departments into the future. This post discusses the basic technologies in use today. These are just a few of them:

• Compliance tech tools manage risk and identify compliance problems. They can assist in identifying risks in contracts, regulations, and more.
• Contract analysis and drafting is one of the hottest areas of legal tech. Contract tools can analyze contracts to identify weaknesses, generate templates, and extract vetted contract terms from databases.
• Cybersecurity helps keep data secure, whether through file encryption, file security programs, or password vaults.
• e-Signature is an efficient and legal way to get electronic documents signed quickly.
• Legal time-tracking tools can assist in automatically tracking time and monitoring activities on your devices.
• Practice management platforms manage all the data and information associated with a case, matter, or internal client.
• Knowledge management assists in organizing work product, research, contacts, and other information, ensuring the information is easily accessible when needed.

These basic legal technology tools are making the work of the legal department more efficient, and they are changing the way law is practiced.